Increasing traffic demands in urban agglomerations lead to a variety of traffic challenges which are reflected in increasing travel times, numbers of stops and pollutant emissions. One of the main challenges in order to counteract these negative effects is the exact determination or estimation of travel times, which is a basic requirement for each traffic control method, especially at urban intersections. In this paper, we present a travel time estimation (TTE) approach for urban areas based on vehicular communication. The impact of communication parameters such as transmission range, message generation rate and penetration rate on the quality of the TTE is analyzed using simulations. For this purpose, the performance of the vehicle-to-infrastructure-based travel time estimation (V2I-based TTE) is compared to a perfect TTE provided by the simulation platform. The results show that, while the penetration rate and the transmission range significantly affect the TTE accuracy, a message generation rate of 1 msg/s should be sufficient if at least 10 % of vehicles are equipped.